Tag Archives: Licensing Guides

Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide

There’s a new (March 2018) Dynamics 365 Licensing Guide covering the licensing of the online versions of the products and incorporating the new Sales Professional User SL and how the new Dynamics 365 for Marketing app is licensed.

From a Dynamics 365 for Sales perspective the new Sales Professional User SL gives access to a subset of the functionality that the Enterprise User SL does, and pages 10/11 give an overview comparison between the two licences while a new Appendix C on page 34 expands on this. It’s also worth knowing that the Sales Enterprise and Sales Professional application modules may not be deployed on the same instance, but may be deployed on the same tenant, and pages 9/10 elaborate on this with some useful diagrams and tables.

You’ll find detail about Dynamics 365 for Marketing on page 10 where it’s explained that this new app is licensed per organisation and is based on the number of contacts in the Customer Engagement database. You can license Dynamics 365 for Marketing as a standalone app or as an add-on to either the Customer Engagement Plan or one of the Customer Engagement apps. In all cases you get an entitlement of 10,000 contacts, and can buy additional contacts in increments of 5,000 if required. The Customer Engagement Plan Applications Use Rights table in Appendix B on page 28 has been updated to include the Marketing app too.

Other changes in this licensing guide include the addition of some useful tables: find additional services and software on page 20, and default instance and infrastructure capability for the Customer Engagement apps on page 22, and for the Unified Operations Plan apps on page 23.

As usual, this guide is added to our ever-growing collection of Microsoft Licensing Guides hosted here: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.

Visual Studio Licensing Guide

Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2018 was first available in November 2017, with Update 1 released on January 29th, 2018. The Visual Studio Licensing Guide (November 2017) is updated for VSTFS 2018 which now includes rights to SQL Server 2017 and is no longer available through the retail channel.

Pages 31/32 confirm that Visual Studio Express 2017 will be the last version of this product, replaced by Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio Community which are also free development products

Find this guide in our ever-growing collection of Licensing Guides here: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.

Windows Server 2016 Licensing Guide

There’s a brand new (May 2017) Windows Server 2016 Licensing Guide released by Microsoft. It’s a delicious 31 pages of licensing loveliness, but here are our highlights:

  • Core Packs: there’s confirmation of the new 16-core packs on page 7, but an interesting note points out that although the cost of eight 2-packs equals one 16-pack, they may not have the same point count in Volume Licensing programs where this matters – MPSA or Open, for example. There’s also confirmation on page 21 (Q4) that the licences from a multi-pack can be split across servers, they’re not joined forever at purchase point
  • Nano Server: this is a deployment option available only if you have SA on your Windows Server licences, and page 6 confirms that you also need SA on any Windows Server CALs too
  • Core Migration: there’s a lot of guidance on migrating from Processor-based to Core licences and, in particular, there are a couple of pages of FAQs starting on page 26, including what happens with Core licence grants if you have a subscription agreement, and how the grants appear in your licensing portal
  • Standard or Datacenter: there’s a useful table on page 25 which shows the breakeven point for virtual machines running on a 2-processor server which has 8 cores per processor. You’ll find that if you’re running 13 or more virtual machines on this server, then it’s cheaper to license with Datacenter edition

As usual, you can find this Licensing Guide with all of its Licensing Guide family and friends at: http://bit.ly/MSLicensingGuides.